Nicky Borrill
Strata Poster
This was exactly what I feared from the first rumblings of B&M hyper… They’re just not adventurous enough to utilise that space well. What they do well is out and back, with sustained floater airtime.Building upon what I said within my ridiculously long ramble (once again, I'm incredibly sorry about that...) about how I predicted that B&M wouldn't necessarily have pulled off anything any better than what we're getting had they been given the same site and brief to play with, I decided to have a go at building a similarly specced B&M Hyper within a site similar in size to what Mack had to play with for Exodus, to give you guys some idea of what I feel B&M might have come up with within the brief that Exodus seems to have followed. I apologise for the slightly shonky trackwork in places, but it was something I cobbled together quite quickly to show a basic idea of what I feel B&M may have done with the brief; I know the profiling isn't the funkiest or most adventurous, and B&M's actual work would have been far more fun and interesting, this is just to offer you all a basic idea:
To clarify a few things that I can sense may be asked:
I don't know about you, but as much as I would have loved a B&M Hyper at Thorpe, and I think a big, sprawling out and back would appeal to me a fair bit more than Exodus looks to, this makes me pretty glad they went for the ride they did instead of trying to cram a B&M Hyper into a brief that's not overly suited to one. I could only fit one singular speed hill into this layout (no full-size parabolic hills), and the rest of it mainly consists of drawn-out, high curves (I can sense Thorpe would have wanted a visually impacting ride regardless of whether it had high inversions or not, so I purposely didn't go for low elements like B&M may have done if left to their own devices) in a similar vein to Thunder Dolphin if it didn't have the building. While I wouldn't say something like this would have been a poor ride by any means, I suspect that had Thorpe come out with something like this, people would have been somewhat disappointed, and it would have made people gaze longingly at foreign B&M Hypers thinking about what could have been; it looks to have less airtime than many UK coasters. In that regard, it makes me all the more chuffed that Merlin and Mack pulled off what they have within the plot, because as I said, I think we have the best possible outcome we could have gotten from a hyper built within the project's constraints, personally.
- The bit I left blank was supposed to represent the bit they've left for the plaza within the real proposal; I tried to make this ride fill as much of a similar area to Exodus as possible.
- I built the ride to a height of 236ft, the exact same as the real proposal. Track length is 3,310ft, top speed is 82mph, and ride duration looks to be 30-40 seconds from lift to brakes, so broadly similar to what Thorpe are proposing.
- The bit with the water splash rings and trim brakes is supposed to represent a splashdown; sorry if it's a bit clumsy-looking, but PlanCo doesn't do real splashdowns with water brakes, so it's the closest thing I could pull off. In terms of the deceleration rate in this section; I went for 4m/s^2.
- The ride has 2 trains with 7 rows/28 riders each.
As requested, TL;DR: I had a go at building a B&M Hyper within the brief that Exodus had, and it had very little airtime, instead looking more like Thunder Dolphin sans the building. This makes me very happy that Thorpe went for the ride they did instead of trying to cram a B&M Hyper into a brief not overly suited to one.
Every potential layout people suggested either took up areas we didn’t know for sure they could build (in fact Josh has confirmed they avoid the water) or would require demolition of areas, structures and rides we weren’t sure they’re ready to get rid of yet. What we did know was they had this loggers plot and old town… Which simply wasn’t big enough to do a B&M justice.
I’m glad you understand better now, where I was coming from the last few weeks.